3 states that may decide the election

With less than a month until Election Day, the primary battlefields for the presidential campaign can be found in just three states: Ohio, Florida and Virginia.

In these big three, home to a combined 60 electoral votes, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are spending both the most money and the most time. Over the past two weeks, the candidates and their allies have aired the most TV ads in Ohio, Florida and Virginia, in that order. And over the same period, Obama and Romney have held more than three times as many campaign events in the Big Three than they have in the other six swing states combined.

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Battleground poll breakdown

The logic behind the candidates homing in on the trio is simple: The way Republicans see it, Romney will have a much steeper climb winning the presidency without taking back all three from the Democratic column. And in the eyes of Obama’s team, they can all but ensure a second term if they win just one of the battlegrounds.

“There are nine states where the campaign is happening, but these are the three where, in all caps, it’s really happening,” said Republican strategist Bruce Haynes.

Obama’s high command is convinced that without a sweep of Virginia, Florida and Ohio, Romney can’t make up the difference further west to reach the needed 270 electoral votes.

“Romney needs an inside straight, he has to have all three,” said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina.

A second senior Obama official, looking at swing-state leads turning into swing-state ties since the first debate, said the electoral ramifications of the trio “is something that gives me a certain level of optimism.”

“One guy has to pitch a perfect game and then still win elsewhere, and the other just needs one of them plus some combination of other states — or gets two [of the big three] and it’s over.”

That’s to say that, assuming Romney carries North Carolina and loses New Hampshire, even if he sweeps the big three he’d still need to capture another Obama 2008 state to get to 270. And, conversely, Obama could take just one of the top trio and still likely win reelection if he’s able to hang on in Wisconsin and one of the three remaining battlegrounds: Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.

But Romney officials, while acknowledging that the Big Three are important, believe that they can still win if they lose one of them. And the good news for Romney is that it increasingly appears that Florida, the biggest of the three, is moving their way.

Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director, noted that a combination of North Carolina, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Virginia, New Hampshire and Florida would get them to 273 electoral votes. “And that doesn’t even include Wisconsin,” said Beeson, referring to the newest swing state to come on the board.

But it’s clear that Republicans would rather not have to run such a gantlet, where winning only two of the big three would create such little margin for error.

“There’s a way to do it by winning other swing states and still not winning all three but it makes just the math harder,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Romney’s debate prep partner and a decades-long veteran of Ohio’s political wars.

@AngelEyez...... I would really love to see those eyes turn blue on Nov 6 as Obama is elected in for second term in office. I cannot understand how Romney can campaign in Ohio when he said that we should let Detroit go bankrupt and when he cast away 47% of the country. For all the evils that Obama has supposedly perpetrated I would still go with the known devil between the two devils.

The election is, basically, over. Once the media abandoned trying to defend the messiah after the first debate, the tide started to turn and you cannot change momentum in the final couple of weeks of an election.

Romney showed in the first debate, without the media filter skewing who he is, that he is a competent, well spoken, well prepared and serious person who is truly interested in trying to help turn your country around. Most supporters of Romney already knew this and the debate proved it to those who didn't know him well and those independents who already knew they didn't want to support Obama again saw that support for Romney would be okay.

There is really nothing that can save Obama now - Romney is the next President of the United States - the only question is how large the margin of victory will be.

The faces in the photos which accompany this piece tell all that needs to be known as to why the President will be re-elected. There just aren't enough old white people anymore.

Only Democrats are obsessed with race and division. There aren't enough of them to save Obama. Republicans and Independents are obsessed with saving the economy and their future and they will make a strong coalition that elects President Romney.

Ton of different variables that could still effect the election one way or the other. Romney's campaign is expected to increase advertising in all the swing states, two debates are still yet to happen, and the Supreme court still needs to decide on early voting, over the weekend, in Ohio. Looking at RCP's and Nate Silver's model the electoral count slightly favors Obama but his supposed firewall is very fragile. Amazingly states like Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire could all come in deciding the election.

If Obama wins Ohio, and Romney wins Virginia and Florida then it could all come down to Nevada; there are a number of different routes to 270 and even a possibility of a tie. Anybody remember all the different hilarious lines, Dan Rather came up with to describe the ridiculously tight race in Florida, during the 2000 election? This may not be that close, but should be just as exciting.

Floridians have already shamed themselves recently by electing as governor Rick Scott, the biggest perpetrator of Medicare fraud in our nation's history. (Scott's organization had to pay $1.7 billion in fines, the biggest ever. He should be in prison serving his time for his crime as I write this, but he escaped by implausibly arguing plausible deniability -- "I'm only the president; I didn't know massive fraud was going on for a decade in our healthcare organization.") Romney and Ryan's Medicare plans should be enough to scare Floridians away from Romney, but Romney and Ryan are good liars. Bald-faced liars too, which fools a lot of the more innocent-minded older Americans. ("A presidential candidate wouldn't lie to us about something so important.")

Ohioans should eschew the Romney-headed Republicans for wanting the car industry to go bankrupt and under. They should need no more to convince them to vote for the savior of our auto industry. We obviously need that kind of faith in American workers and lucrative foresight our president demonstrated as we navigate our future course in this economically shaky world.

All voters should by now know the voodoo economics of Reagan didn't balance our budgets and lead to surplus growth as the Republican trickle-down theorists predicted. Instead, that formula of cutting taxes on the wealthy big time (and peanuts for the rest of US) and adding to our enormous defense spending exploded our national debt exponentially. American voters fell for the same pie-in-the-sky growth promises that Bush/Cheney peddled too and now we're in the jobless mess it produced. Income inequality sky-rocketed during those decades and plutocracy took deeper root in our country, but justice and prosperity for all became a dimmer dream.